1
ROSE-ANN’S bobbed hair was generally applauded. There were more studio
parties. Felix frivoled, theorized, and wrote jocund dramatic
criticisms, with the thought of Hawkins always at the back of his mind.
Hawkins’s play had been cast, re-cast, rewritten, and finally tried out
“on the dog,” that is to say, an audience at Atlantic City. And
something was still wrong. So the cast had been dismissed, the scenery
stored, and Hawkins was desperately rewriting his play for the
seventeenth time—this time in collaboration with an expert
farce-builder. And Felix remained for a while longer the acting dramatic
critic of the Chronicle. He figured that if enough misfortunes happened
to Hawkins’s farce, his own tenure in office might last long enough to
entitle him to it in the end. With the most amiable feelings toward
Hawkins, he nevertheless fervently wished “Tootsie-Wootsie” the worst of
bad luck.
Meanwhile, early in January, he began having his portrait painted by
Dorothy Sheridan.
2
Having one’s portrait painted was decidedly an experience. When he came
for his first sitting, he found Dorothy Sheridan in a big kitchen apron,
with her sleeves rolled up, looking more as if she were going to cook a
meal than paint a picture. She had called “Come!” to his knock, and when
he entered she went on scraping the paint from a palette with no more
than a casual nod to him. He put his hat under his arm, and shifting his
stick to the crook of his elbow, took out a cigarette and lighted it;
then turned and looked curiously and hesitantly about the room.
“There! Keep that! Just that way!” Dorothy Sheridan called. “That’s very
good. Very characteristic. No, just as you were. That’s right—relax a
little.”
She gave him these orders from half way across the large studio room,
where she stood in a brusque commanding attitude. Felix obeyed.
“One minute!” And she ran up the steps to the mezzanine behind and above
Felix, and presently he heard from overhead the swish of falling cloth.
He half turned, and saw that she had flung over the edge of the
mezzanine railing a long piece of rose-coloured silk, which reached the
floor behind him.
“That’s for a background,” she said, and Felix resumed his pose.
She came back, pushed out an easel not far from him and a little to one
side, and then took up a position at a distance from both him and the
easel, armed with a brown crayon. She looked at him intently, with wide
eyes, bending a little, with head forward and face uplifted. “Mm,” she
said, reflectively, and walked swiftly up to the easel and commenced to
draw upon the blank canvas with swift, vigorous strokes of her crayon.
After a little, she walked back to her former place, resumed her
wide-eyed stare, and then returned once more to the canvas.
After half an hour of this, looking at her subject and drawing on the
canvas in turn, she threw down her crayon. “Can you remember that pose?”
she asked.
Of course Felix could remember it. It was a pose into which he fell
naturally. “Yes,” he said. “May I look?”
“If you want to,” she said indifferently, taking off her apron.
Felix strolled over and looked at the crayon sketch on the canvas. It
was a bold caricature of himself, poised hesitantly with stick and
cigarette, blithe, debonair, and above all a figure of indecision. Was
that himself?
“That’s all for today,” said the painter. “Same time, same day, next
week. Don’t forget.”
He went away, startled and puzzled.
Next week, as he came in, eager for one more look at that disconcerting
caricature, he found the artist painting it out with a thin grey wash.
“Why do you do that?” he asked.
“Oh, that was only to get the pose,” she said. “This time I want to get
the likeness.”
The portrait seemed to Felix completed at the end of an hour, when she
declared the sitting over and took off her apron. It was utterly
different from the crayon caricature which had preceded it on the
canvas. Out of the misty grey background emerged a face and two hands,
delicately painted, and catching the quizzical expression of mouth and
eyes and the rather limp gesture of the hands, but in a manner which did
not carry more than a few feet from the canvas. Moreover, this painting
was utterly unlike the other things of hers that he had seen. He
wondered, but the painter had hung up her apron and was looking at a
portfolio of drawings, indifferent to his existence, so he withdrew.
The next time provided still a new surprise. The painter had just washed
out the face and hands on the canvas with turpentine, and was scraping
off the paint when he came in. Was this a confession of failure? or some
new way of painting? or simply the way all painters went to work?
He was pretty certain, however, that the method pursued in this present
sitting was extraordinary; for this time the painter measured his head
with a pair of calipers, up and down and in every direction, and noted
down the figures on a piece of paper and regarded them thoughtfully.
Then she came up to him and felt of his skull with her hands; it was not
in the least like a caress—it was exactly as if she were a surgeon, and
he were a patient, about to be operated upon.
“Bones!” she said, as if that explained everything, and went to work on
her canvas with a brush dipped in blue paint.... The result, which Felix
viewed with a very queer sensation at the end of the sitting, was a
skeleton-like figure done in blue, with arms and legs like pieces of
steel machinery, and a face with dark blue eye sockets and a pale blue
jaw.... “Lines of force,” explained the painter, and he went away not
knowing whether to laugh or not.
This skeleton was obliterated at the beginning of the fourth sitting, as
the other stages of the picture had been, and Felix wondered, what next?
Colour, it seemed, this time! Great splashes and daubs of colour, put on
anyhow, spread out with a palette-knife, or the painter’s thumb—a riot,
an orgy of rose and green and purple-brown, with only a suggestion of
Felix amid the chromatic swirls....
Felix described each of these stages to Rose-Ann with zest, and went
with infinite curiosity to every new sitting....
The fifth time there was a blank new canvas awaiting him, and when he
asked what had become of the other, she replied: “Burned it up. All
covered with paint. Always use a fresh canvas if you can afford it.”
She emerged from her preoccupation with her palette long enough to
become aware of his surprise, and to explain further:
“All that was just getting acquainted with my subject. Now we’re ready
to begin.”
And taking up her position, a little closer this time to him and the
easel, she bent upon him that wide-eyed, impersonal stare.... Felix was
rather in awe of her by this time. She had ceased to seem to him the
careless, slangy bohemian girl that he had first known. She was an
expert and delicate technician. Those four portraits in succession had
stunned his imagination. She seemed to him almost superhuman—with a
little of the flavour of black magic in her. That wide-eyed impersonal
stare was part of the effect. At first she seemed merely a pretty girl
lifting her face to yours and looking at you, steadily; and if one was
not used to returning the wide-eyed stare of a pretty girl, one became a
little embarrassed—there is something so intimate about this meeting and
touching through the eyes; one seems to be let in, unreservedly, to some
mysterious depth. But, as the stare continued, piercing you, probing
you, seeing you with calm indifference, you became uneasy and almost
afraid—you wanted to look away, and that seemed cowardly and evasive, so
you kept on staring back as long as you could ... until those dark blue
eyes of hers seemed profound gulfs over which you hung, dizzy,
tottering, about to drown.... And then, saying “Mm,” she went over to
her canvas again and put on a little dab of paint. She had probably been
considering carefully whether or not she had made your nose too long!
3
Felix raved in this fashion to Rose-Ann, who heard him with interest and
in silence till he had finished.
“And what does the portrait look like now?” she asked.
“Well—very much like any other portrait, I must say. A little bolder,
and lots of colour, but nothing startling. Or perhaps I’ve become so
used to startling things by now that this seems a little tame.”
The last sitting was a prolonged one, in which the painter looked at him
for what seemed hours at a time, and in which he could not rid himself
of the perturbing conviction that she was seeing into his soul.... He
was very tired when she finished at last—the sitting had as a matter of
fact taken two hours, with only a few momentary rests—and Felix was in a
mood of weariness and self-distrust when he went over to look at the
completed portrait. Perhaps that accounted for what he saw:
Painted with an exquisite and mordant irony—with stick and cigarette,
uncertainly halting, as if in front of life, the head tilted with a
quirk of inquiry, the face curious and evasive, with something that was
almost boldness in the eyes, something that was almost courage in the
chin—Felix Fay, observant, indecisive, inadequate, against a
rose-coloured background.
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